Gone Girl, The Cool Girl Speech, Margaret Atwood, Girls in Politics, and Becoming the Villainess

So, I finally read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.  I know, you’re saying, “You’re way behind on your reading, Jeannine!” Yes, I am!

Anyway, so I’ve been thinking about Flynn’s portrayal of Amy, is it complex, nuanced, is it misogynistic or feminist? I’m thinking about the “Cool Girl” speech, in which the main female character runs down the idea that men want the woman that Cameron Diaz plays in all her films and Flynn’s own interviews and articles.

I’m thinking about Margaret Atwood, all Atwood’s wonderful complex villainesses: Atwood’s murderesses and unkind children, her suddenly violent maids. Atwood’s “bad girls” – and her assertion that to be truly feminist, we have depict women characters as being fully human, capable of both great heroism and great evil. Atwood herself is a little acerbic, a little bit difficult, definitely not giving off the maternal/nice vibe you might expect from a 72-or-so year old woman writer.

So, if you’ve read my first book, Becoming the Villainess, it’s very much about the ideas espoused in the Cool Girl speech. You could argue my “Snow Queen” – probably the most villainess-y villainess in there, unrepentantly eating children and whatnot – has a backstory that includes throwing back shots of whiskey and pastrami sandwiches while remaining perfectly beautiful, pretty much the embodiment of every guy’s fantasy cool girl. The book was inspired by some “bad girls” – Atwood’s villainesses, certainly, Louise Gluck, probably, especially her bad girls in Meadowlands, and the sexed-up villainesses of comic book and mythological fame – evil stepmothers right next to Ovid’s Procne, serving up her son to her husband in revenge for his raping of her sister Philomel.

In my twenties, when I started writing the book, I think, frighteningly, I might also have been playing a cool girl role – I was, after all, the girl who hung out mostly with guys, could quote Star Wars and Fletch, read comic books, and was pretty good at video games, especially first-person shooters. My marriage was still pretty young then. I had started to notice “feminism,” as such, only a few years before I wrote the book – and noting the sad lack of women in power in politics, in comic books, in any and all pop culture – I mean, everywhere. There was one kind of strong woman character allowed – and she was “the villainess.”

This was before movies like Maleficent started reclaiming powerful women’s stories for an alternate treatment, before “Once Upon a Time’s” sympathetic mayor villainess/heroine. That book was my discovery, my way of writing myself out of a seemingly impossible quandry – to remain the princess, the victim, the good girl, or to enter into enemy territory, empowered, maybe sexy, but crazy/dangerous/deadly/evil.

Gone Girl is making me realize that since the time I started writing my first book around 1996 – how much has changed? Shows like “The Good Wife” and “Scandal” have been popular precisely, I think, because they mine this territory of “good girl on the brink of bad.” But is a woman allowed to be sexual, intelligent, powerful – and still a heroine? Look at what happens to women who succeed – at anything – becoming a CEO, or a senator. She’s basically demonized. Look at Gamergate. What is the message that Gone Girl is giving us? Since the “Cool Girl” speech is made by a crazed psychopath, every man with a “perfect” girlfriend’s nightmare of what could go wrong, how are we supposed to take that text?

What is the ultimate message in Becoming the Villainess? (I have high school students write to ask me that all the time. Here’s your secret chance, kids!) I talk about video game heroines trapped in endless rounds of sexualized death (Lara Croft) and princesses trapped in towers becoming dangerous (Cinderella) and Wonder Woman’s secret inner conflict between violence and peace, vigilantism and working for a greater good…but what is the answer for a woman who wants a way out, Buffy when she’s tired of being a Martyr, the superheroine tired of wearing heels and a thong? As a 41-year-old woman today, I don’t want to be playing at being any kind of girl, good girl/bad girl/cool girl/gone girl whatever. I want to be authentic. I want to find a way out of the victim/villainess conundrum.